This Angel is pissed off. I'm Nurse Anne and I work on large general medical ward in the NHS. These are the wards with the most issues surrounding nursing care. The problems are mostly down to intentional understaffing by hospital chiefs that result in a lack of real nurses on the wards.
"The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain, for they merely make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy and the narrow more narrow"-Florence Nightengale

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

What the Hell is Wrong with David Cameron

No David, the wards are fucked up hell holes, the students do not really function in a supernumery manner, and returning nurse training to hospital schools of nursing won't change a goddamn thing.

We need a lot more highly skilled and experienced RN's on the wards. Not more novices. Novices are all we have. Give us more trained nurses on the wards and the students may actually learn something, rather than running around like a headless chicken answering callbells and taking shortcuts so that she can deal with 20 patients per second.

Look at the lack of trained staff on the wards. Look at nurse ratio statistics. Look at nurse education statistics. Look at what the hospital managers have done to deskill the nursing workforce by bringing in too many untrained carers while skimping on trained staff. What they have done isn't cost effective because of the high costs of patient complications that result from lack of RN's. What they have done just hurts patients and ruins nurses.

Let's all write to him and set him straight.

No way is a bedside RN who didn't train at university at least on some level ever coming near me or my sick relative.

The degree students do work on the ward and they jump straight in and get their hands dirty. Supernumery my ass, no way are they actually supernumery. The ward environments are so completely fucked up that you couldn't teach Kerry Katona to snort cocaine properly on them. It wouldn't matter if she was doing a degree course on it or the "good old" nose hands on training.

But I guess he can't be any worse than Gordon Brown. What do you guys think?

14 comments:

I was going to write a blog on this earlier but it's as simple as this; Trust a fucking tory to jump up the arse of joe public. I just KNEW that after the complete public "outrage" when it was announced english students were going to move to the degree, that the conservatives would be all over it. It seems to me that he is adressing the real concerns (and naieve concerns at that) that the PUBLIC have with nurse training rather than what concerns NURSES have with Nurse training. I'm going to end up not fucking voting this year for either party, they both talk shit. It makes me so angry!

I actually emailed Mr Cameron with the address of your blog. I'm not entirely sure what I expected to happen afterwards, but I am extra disappointed to hear him say what he did. Keep up the good work, here and in your hospital.With love from a HCA intending on doing my Nursing degree x

David Cameron is probably the last person who wants to see any kind of legistlation to go through to see the wards staffed properly. He would see this as something that costs money. It actually saves money because of decreased patient complications etc.

I think we all need to be prepared for a nurseless future. I recently had someone tell me to just quit if I don't like it. Well yes, that is what everyone is doing. No one but the most callous people can handle the ward conditions. We will have no nurses on our wards.

What that means for us as patients is this: when we go into hospital a brilliant doctors will operate or diagnose us and order a treatment plan. And we will suffer malnutrition and dehydration, pressure sores and infections as a result of shortstaffing. We will suffer from failure to rescue and errors as a result of poorly educated nurses. This is a situation that is bound to get worse, especially if they cannot even see why bedside nurses should be as highly educated as possible.

If they don't improve working conditions for nurses we will just lose them. That's what management wants because they don't want to pay them.

True, she hated the sand and didn't actually go down to the beach. His gold efforts went nowhere but his young five year old daughter in the early 1850's would go on to be a ed nationally recognized star. of other precious expensive metals including silver, platinum, copper, lead,

In an atmosphere if universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell.

Why has Nursing Care Deteriorated

Good nurses are failing every day to provide their patients with a decent standard of care. You want to know what has happened? Read this book and understand that similiar things have happened in the UK. Similiar causes, similiar consequences. And remember this. The failings in care have nothing to do with educated nurses or nurses who don't care. We need more well educated nurses on the wards rather than intentional short staffing by management.

About Me

I am a university educated registered nurse. We had a hell of a lot of hands on practice as well as our academic courses. The only people who say that you don't need a brain or an education to be an RN are the people who do not have any direct experience of nursing in acute care on today's wards. I have yet to meet a nurse who thinks that she is above providing basic care. I work with nurses who are completely unable to provide basic care due to ward conditions.
I have lived and worked in 3 countries and have seen more similarities than differences. I have been a qualified nurse for nearly 15 years. I never used to use foul language until working on the wards got to me. It's a mess everywhere, not just the NHS.
Hospital management is slashing the numbers of staff on the ward whilst filling us up with more patients than we can handle... patients who are increasingly frail. After an 8-14 hour shift without stopping once we have still barely scratched the surface of being able to do what we need to do for our patients.

Quotes of Interest. Education of Nurses.

Hospitals with higher proportions of baccalaureate-prepared nurses tended to have lower 30-day mortality rates. Our findings indicated that a 10% increase in the proportion of baccalaureate prepared nurses was associated with 9 fewer deaths for every 1,000 discharged patients."...Journal of advanced nursing 2007

THIS MEANS WE NEED WELL EDUCATED NURSES AT THE BEDSIDE NOT IN ADVANCED ROLES

Dr. Linda Aiken and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania identified a clear link between higher levels of nursing education and better patient outcomes. This extensive study found that surgical patients have a "substantial survival advantage" if treated in hospitals with higher proportions of nurses educated at the baccalaureate or higher degree level.

THIS MEANS WE NEED WELL EDUCATED NURSES AT THE BEDSIDE NOT IN ADVANCED ROLES

Dr. Linda Aiken and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research found that patients experienced significantly lower mortality and failure to rescue rates in hospitals where more highly educated nurses are providing direct patient care.

Evidence shows that nursing education level is a factor in patient safety and quality of care. As cited in the report When Care Becomes a Burden released by the Milbank Memorial Fund in 2001, two separate studies conducted in 1996 - one by the state of New York and one by the state of Texas - clearly show that significantly higher levels of medication errors and procedural violations are committed by nurses prepared at the associate degree and diploma levels as compared with the baccalaureate level.

Registered Nurse Staffing Ratios

International Council of Nurses Fact Sheet:

In a given unit the optimal workload for a registered nurse was four patients. Increasing the workload to 6 resulted in patients being 14% more likely to die within 30 days of admission.

A workload of 8 patients versus 4 was associated with a 31% increase in mortality. (In the NHS RN's each have anywhere from 10-35 patients per RN. It doesn't need to be this way..Anne)

Registered Nurses in NHS hospitals usually have between 10 and 30+ patients each on general wards.

Earlier in the year, the New England Journal of Medicine published results from another study of similar genre reported by a different group of nurse researchers. In that paper, Needleman et al3 examined whether different levels of nurse staffing are related to a patient’s risk of developing complications or of dying. Data from more than 5 million medical patient discharges and more than 1.1 million surgical patient discharges from 799 hospitals in 11 different states revealed that patients receiving more care from RNs (compared to licensed practical nurses and nurses’ aides) and those receiving the most hours of care per day from RNs experienced fewer complications and lower mortality rates than those who received more of their care from licensed practical nurses and/or aides. Specifically for medical patients, those who received more hours per day of care from an RN and/or those who had a greater proportions of their care provided by RNs experienced statistically significant shorter length of stay and lower complication rates (urinary tract infections, gastrointestinal bleeding, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, or shock), as well as fewer deaths from these and other (sepsis, deep vein thrombosis) complications

•Lower levels of hospital registered nurse staffing are associated with more adverse outcomes such as Pneumonia, pressure sores and death.
•Patients have higher acuity, yet the skill levels of the nursing staff have declined as hospitals replace RN's with untrained carers.
•Higher acuity patients and the added responsibilities that come with them increase the registered nurse workload.
•Avoidable adverse outcomes such as pneumonia can raise treatment costs by up to $28,000.
•Hiring more RNs does not decrease profits. (Hospital bosses don't understand this. They think that they will save money by shedding real nurses in favour of carers and assistants. The damage done to the patients as a result of this costs more moneyi.e expensive deaths, complications,and lawsuits, and complaints....Anne)

Disclaimer

I know I swear too much. I am truly very sorry if you are offended. Please do not visit my blog if foul language upsets you. I want to help people. That is why I started this blog and that is why I became a Nurse. I won't run away from Nursing just yet. I want to stick around and make things better. I don't want the nurses caring for me when I am sick working in the same conditions that I am. Of course this is all just a figmant of my imagination anyway and I am not even in this reality. Or am I?Any opinions expressed in my posts are mine and mine alone and do not represent the viewpoint of the NHS, the RCN, God, or anyone else.